Class 11 History Chapter 3 Nomadic Empires Important Questions with Answers in English

Q. What is a ger?

Answer: A ger is the portable, felt-covered tent in which Mongol families lived as they moved with their herds between winter and summer pasture.

Q. What was a quriltai?

Answer: A quriltai was an assembly of Mongol chieftains that took collective decisions on campaigns, the division of plunder, pasture lands and succession.

Q. Name the four khanates into which the Mongol dominion eventually divided.

Answer: The Yuan dynasty in China and the Il-Khanid state in Iran, both under Toluy’s descendants, the Chaghataid khanate in Turkistan, and the Jochid khanate in the Russian steppes, known as the Golden Horde.

Q. What was the qubcur?

Answer: The qubcur was a tax of one tenth of a nomad household’s herd, paid in horses or livestock, which funded the empire’s courier system.

Q. Who was Oelun-eke?

Answer: Oelun-eke was Temujin’s mother, who brought him and his brothers up in great hardship after his father Yesugei was murdered.

Q. What does the title Genghis Khan mean, and when was it conferred?

Answer: It means the Oceanic Khan, or Universal Ruler, and it was conferred on Temujin at the quriltai of 1206.

Q. What is a qanat?

Answer: A qanat is an underground irrigation canal of the arid Iranian plateau, many of which fell into disrepair during the instability of the Mongol conquests.

Q. Why was the Great Wall of China built?

Answer: It grew out of fortifications raised against steppe raiders from as early as the eighth century BCE, joined from the third century BCE into one continuous line of defence, and it stands as a record of how much disruption nomadic raids caused in north China.

Q. Why did the Mongol steppe support no cities of its own?

Answer: Neither of its two economies could feed a crowded, permanent settlement. Pastoralism needed the herds to keep moving between winter and summer pasture, and hunting and gathering in the Siberian forests supported even fewer people, so the population stayed thin and mobile.

Q. What did the word yasaq originally mean, and how did its meaning change?

Answer: In its earliest form yasaq meant law, decree or order, and the surviving details concern administrative rules for the hunt, the army and the postal system. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Mongols were using the related word yasa in a far wider sense, for the whole legal code of Genghis Khan.

Q. State two ways in which Genghis Khan’s army differed from the older steppe armies.

Answer: First, the old decimal units of 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 kept clan and tribe together, whereas Genghis Khan deliberately broke up those groupings and mixed their members into new units. Second, command passed to his own four sons and to captains called noyan, chosen for loyalty rather than for inherited clan rank.

Q. Why did the Mongol state issue the paiza, and what did traders pay for the same protection?

Answer: The paiza, called gerege in Mongolian, was a pass that guaranteed a traveller safe conduct across Mongol territory, which was what made long journeys across Eurasia practical. Traders bought the same protection by paying a tax called baj, and both the pass and the tax acknowledged the authority of the Mongol Khan.

Q. What two contrasting images of Genghis Khan does the chapter place side by side?

Answer: To the town dwellers of thirteenth-century China, Iran and eastern Europe he was the destroyer of cities, remembered with fear as the man responsible for thousands of deaths. To the Mongols he was their greatest leader, who ended tribal warfare, brought prosperity and restored the trade routes that carried travellers like Marco Polo.

Q. Give two reasons why trade with China mattered so much to the Mongols.

Answer: The steppe simply did not produce everything a household needed, so agricultural produce and iron utensils had to be got from China in exchange for horses, furs and game. Trade also gave the Mongols a peaceful way of drawing on the wealth of a far richer neighbour, and when it failed or the terms turned against them, plunder took its place.

Q. What was an anda, and how did a naukar differ from one?

Answer: An anda was a blood-brother, a rank Genghis Khan conferred publicly on some long-serving companions. A naukar was a bondsman, a freeman of humbler birth taken into his personal service. Both ranks came from closeness to the Great Khan rather than from ancestry, but the anda stood as an equal and the naukar as a servant.

Q. Why does the chapter call the phrase ‘nomadic empires’ an apparent contradiction?

Answer: Nomads are usually pictured as wanderers with little difference of wealth or role between families and hardly any political organisation, while an empire suggests a fixed place, complex social and economic structures and an elaborate machinery of government. The chapter’s own argument is that a close study of the Mongols dissolves the contradiction.

Q. What did Mongke write to Louis IX of France, and what does the letter reveal?

Answer: Mongke warned the French king that in Heaven there is only one Eternal Sky and on earth only one Lord, Genghis Khan, the Son of Heaven, and that the Mongols knew what to do if an army were brought against them. The letter shows that the Mongol claim was to universal rule by divine mandate, not merely to leadership of a Mongol confederacy.

Q. How did Genghis Khan’s confederation differ from Attila’s?

Answer: In sheer size the only earlier confederation to compare with it was the one Attila built in the fifth century, and he died in 453. The difference lies in durability: Attila’s alliance broke up with his death, while Genghis Khan’s political system outlasted its founder and went on defeating larger, better-equipped armies in China, Iran and eastern Europe.

Q. Explain how Genghis Khan reorganised his army, and why he broke up the old tribal groupings.

Answer: The old arrangement. On the steppe every able-bodied adult male bore arms, and the army was raised as needed on the old decimal pattern of units of 10, 100, 1,000 and, on paper, 10,000 men, called a tuman. Clan and tribe stayed together inside those units.
What he changed. As conquest brought in Turkic Uighurs who joined willingly and defeated peoples like the Kereyits, Genghis Khan kept the decimal frame but split the old clan and tribal blocks apart and scattered their members across new, mixed units. Moving between units without permission was punished harshly.
Who commanded it. The new units served under his four sons and under specially chosen captains, the noyan.
Why he did it. A soldier surrounded by men of other clans could no longer fall back on tribal loyalty, so loyalty had to run upward to the Great Khan instead. This is why the new nobility rested on personal ties, anda and naukar, rather than on inherited clan status, and it is what made the army an instrument of one man’s will.

Q. Describe the four ulus assigned to Genghis Khan’s sons, and explain why an ulus was not a fixed territory in his lifetime.

Answer: The four shares. Jochi, the eldest, received the Russian steppes, a frontier the book describes as reaching as far west as his horses could roam. Chaghatai received the Transoxianian steppe and the lands north of the Pamirs, next to his brother’s share. Ogodei was named the future Great Khan and made Karakorum his capital. Toluy, the youngest, received the Mongol homeland itself, following the steppe custom by which the youngest son inherits the home hearth.
Why the frontiers stayed fluid. Conquest was still going on, so no boundary could be final, and the sense of the empire as one shared family patrimony was still strong.
How that unity was maintained. Each prince’s own contingent, a tama, was stationed inside every ulus, and the quriltai went on deciding campaigns, plunder, pasture and succession for the whole family together.
The later change. Only from the middle of the thirteenth century, as separate dynasties emerged, did ulus come to mean a fixed territorial dominion.

Q. Why do historians of the Mongols also have to work as philologists? Answer with examples from the chapter.

Answer: The sources are scattered across languages. The Mongol empire stretched across Eurasia, so material about it survives in Chinese, Mongolian, Persian and Arabic above all, and also in Italian, Latin, French and Russian.
The versions disagree. The same event is often recorded quite differently in two languages of the same text. The Mongolian and Chinese versions of the Secret History of the Mongols do not fully match, and even the Italian and Latin versions of Marco Polo’s account of his travels differ from each other.
So words have to be weighed, not just read. A historian must compare word choices across languages to decide what a term meant and which version to trust.
Named examples. Igor de Rachewiltz worked in this way on the Secret History of the Mongols, and Gerhard Doerfer on the Mongol and Turkic words that entered Persian.

Q. Describe the effects of the Mongol conquests on the settled societies they overran.

Answer: Immediate destruction. Through the first half of the thirteenth century cities were destroyed, farmland ruined, and trade and handicraft production disrupted. Tens of thousands were killed and even more enslaved, across every class, although the exact numbers cannot be trusted because chroniclers inflated them.
An ecological blow. In Iran the underground irrigation canals, the qanats, stopped receiving regular maintenance during the instability, so they decayed and the desert crept forward. Parts of Khurasan never fully recovered.
A change of policy. Once conquest gave way to rule, Mongol leaders began to see the countryside as a source of revenue. Qubilai Khan presented himself as the protector of peasants and cities, and in the 1290s Ghazan Khan warned his commanders against plundering them.
A wider gain. With Europe and China linked under one authority, the Silk Route flourished as never before, and travellers moved with the safe conduct of the paiza.

Q. What was the Pax Mongolica, and how did it change long-distance trade and travel?

Answer: What it was. Pax Mongolica, the Mongol Peace, is the name given to the period of relative stability across Eurasia once the Mongol conquests had settled, when Europe and China lay for the first time within one connected system of control.
What it did to trade. Silk Route commerce reached its height. Where the route had previously ended in China, it now ran on north into Mongolia, all the way to Karakorum, the heart of the new empire.
How travel was made safe. Travellers carried a pass called paiza in Persian and gerege in Mongolian, and traders paid a tax called baj for the same protection. Both amounted to an acknowledgement of the Mongol Khan’s authority.
What a traveller found. William of Rubruck reached Karakorum in 1254 and met a woman from Lorraine and a Parisian goldsmith there, and saw Nestorian, Muslim, Buddhist and Taoist clergy at the same court festivals. The Mongol Peace was therefore a movement of people and ideas as much as of goods.

Q. Explain why Mongol expansion towards western Europe could not be sustained after the 1260s.

Answer: How far they had already reached. Batu’s campaigns of 1236 to 1241 devastated Russia as far as Moscow, took Poland and Hungary, and brought a Mongol army to the gates of Vienna, while Egypt too lay within striking distance.
Succession politics came first. For the descendants of Jochi and Ogodei, controlling the office of Great Khan mattered more than campaigns in a distant Europe, so their energies went into family politics.
Resources were redirected. The rising Toluyid branch put its strength into Iran in the 1250s and China in the 1260s, and the force left facing Egypt was small and understaffed, which is why it was defeated there.
A frontier quarrel of their own. Conflict between the Jochid and Toluyid lines along the Russo-Iranian frontier kept pulling the Jochids away from any further European campaign.
The retreat from the Hungarian steppes and the defeat in Egypt therefore mark a change in Mongol politics rather than a sudden rise in European strength.

Q. How did the meaning of the yasa grow after Genghis Khan’s death, and why did the Mongols need it?

Answer: The narrow beginning. The earliest form of the word, yasaq, meant law, decree or order, and the details that survive concern administrative regulation of the hunt, the army and the postal system.
The wider claim. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Mongols were using yasa for the whole legal code of Genghis Khan, said to have been promulgated at the quriltai of 1206.
Why the claim was useful. The Mongols were by then a small minority ruling sophisticated urban societies that had legal traditions and histories of their own. A sacred law inherited from their own ancestor let them defend their identity, cast Genghis Khan as a lawgiver of the stature of Moses or Solomon, and gave them the confidence to absorb settled customs without ceasing to be Mongols.
What it really was. In all likelihood a compilation of ordinary Mongol customary tradition, given the weight of Genghis Khan’s name. David Ayalon’s research traced how his successors kept reshaping it, and Hafiz-i Tanish could describe ‘Abdullah Khan’s Muslim prayers in the late sixteenth century as being performed according to the yasa of Genghis Khan.

Q. Trace the career of Genghis Khan from his birth to the quriltai of 1206.

Answer: Birth and family. He was born near the Onon river in what is now northern Mongolia. NCERT gives two years for this, about 1162 in its running text and about 1167 in its own timeline table, so either may appear in a question. He was named Temujin, son of Yesugei, chieftain of the Kiyat within the Borjigid clan.
Years of hardship. Yesugei was murdered while Temujin was young, and his mother Oelun-eke raised the children in poverty. Temujin was captured and enslaved at one point, and soon after his marriage his wife Borte was kidnapped and had to be recovered by force.
The alliances that mattered. Boghurchu became his first and lifelong ally. Jamuqa became his blood-brother, or anda, though the friendship later turned into bitter rivalry. He also revived his father’s old alliance with Tughril, called Ong Khan, ruler of the Kereyits.
Defeating his rivals. Through the 1180s and 1190s he used the alliance with Ong Khan to defeat Jamuqa. He then turned on the Tatars, who had killed his father, and on the Kereyits and Ong Khan himself by 1203, and finally on the Naiman and on Jamuqa again in 1206.
The quriltai of 1206. The assembly of Mongol chieftains proclaimed him Great Khan of the Mongols, Qa’an, with the title Genghis Khan, the Oceanic Khan or Universal Ruler.
Why it lasted. Just before the quriltai he had already reorganised the Mongols into a disciplined military force, which is what turned a personal victory into a durable political system.

Q. ‘The Mongol relationship with agrarian society changed over the course of the thirteenth century.’ Discuss, with reference to north China, south China and Iran.

Answer: The starting point. Conquered peoples had every reason to hate their nomadic rulers: cities were destroyed, farmland laid waste, trade and craft production broken, and huge numbers killed or enslaved.
North China in the 1230s. While the Mongols were fighting the Chin dynasty, a strong pressure group inside the leadership argued for massacring the peasantry outright and turning the fields into pasture for Mongol herds. This is the pastoralist interest at its purest.
South China by the 1270s. Once south China too had been absorbed, Qubilai Khan, who died in 1294, presented himself as the protector of peasants and cities rather than their destroyer.
Iran in the 1290s. Ghazan Khan, the Il-Khanid ruler and the first of his line to convert to Islam, warned his Mongol and Turkish commanders that a peasantry stripped of oxen, seed and standing crops would produce nothing the following year, and that obedient peasants had to be told apart from rebels. The speech was probably drafted by his Persian wazir Rashiduddin.
The administrators who made the change possible. From Genghis Khan’s own reign, civil administrators were recruited from the conquered societies and moved around the empire, Chinese secretaries serving in Iran and Persians in China. Yeh-lu Ch’u-ts’ai muted some of Ogodei’s harsher instincts, and the Juwaini family played a comparable role in Iran.
The conclusion. The shift was driven by interest rather than by sentiment: a state that had begun by plundering the countryside came to depend on taxing it, and its policy followed.

Q. How were the sources on the Mongols produced, and why must they be read critically? Refer to Russian scholarship and to the inflated casualty figures in your answer.

Answer: Written by outsiders. The Mongols lived on the move and wrote almost nothing down themselves, so nearly all our information comes from chronicles, travelogues and documents produced by city-based literati who were not Mongols.
Hostility built into the material. Many such writers were unfamiliar with nomadic life or openly hostile to it, and they wrote within an old tradition that labelled all nomads barbarians, a Greek word for anyone who was not Greek and whose speech sounded like noise.
But not uniformly hostile. Mongol success drew Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Turkish and Muslim writers into their service, and some produced sympathetic accounts and even eulogies.
Russian scholarship. Tsarist-era travellers, soldiers, merchants and antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries left detailed survey notes as the Russian empire pushed into Central Asia. After the Revolution, Soviet historians tried to fit Mongol history into a theory of stages of production, from tribal to feudal. Even within that rigid frame, Boris Yakovlevich Vladimirtsov produced excellent research, while Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold’s sympathetic assessment brought him trouble with Stalinist censors and his work appeared in full only in the 1960s.
The inflated figures. The chronicles report 1,747,000 dead at Nishapur in 1220, 1,600,000 at Herat in 1222 and 800,000 at Baghdad in 1258. Juwaini explains his own figure of 1,300,000 at Merv by saying the counting took thirteen days at a hundred thousand corpses a day. Later Il-Khanid chronicles pushed further, turning an eyewitness count of 400 defenders at Bukhara’s citadel into 30,000 killed.
Why they exaggerated. Terror was useful to the Mongols, and dramatic contrast was useful to chroniclers who wished to praise their own patrons for having ended the great killings of the past. The figures are therefore evidence of how the Mongols were remembered, and cannot be read as a census.

Q. Explain how one shared family dominion became four separate khanates, and what this did to the way Mongol history was written.

Answer: The pressure to settle. The further a lineage lived from the original steppe homeland, the stronger the pull to settle down and adopt local ways.
From patrimony to dynasty. By the middle of the thirteenth century the sense of one shared family inheritance was giving way to separate dynasties, each ruling its own share, and the word ulus, once a fluid frontier, came to mean a fixed territorial kingdom.
Why it happened. Genghis Khanid descendants competed with one another both for the office of Great Khan and for the most prized pastoral lands, and these succession struggles hardened the divisions.
The four khanates. Toluy’s line produced the Yuan dynasty in China and, through Hulegu, the Il-Khanid state in Iran. Chaghatai’s descendants held the steppes north of Transoxiana, called Turkistan. Jochi’s descendants held the Russian steppes as the Golden Horde. Nomadic traditions lasted longest among the Chaghataids and the Golden Horde, the two furthest from settled courts.
The effect on history writing. The Toluyid branch, holding both China and Iran, could pay far more literati than its cousins, so its version of the family’s quarrels is the one that survives in the histories written under its patronage.
Even Genghis Khan was rewritten. Late thirteenth-century Persian chronicles from Il-Khanid Iran exaggerated his killings for dramatic effect, while still praising him and expressing relief that the great killings of the past were over. Family politics thus shaped not only the empire’s map but its memory.